“The
journey involves loss; it always involves loss. You’ve left a place; you’ve
left people behind you,left memories behind you. But there seems to me to be a
process of reinvention that can happen during the journey. And that process of
reinvention before the arrival to me is a crucial metaphor of what we do in
life, because we must maintain the ability to reinvent ourselves, if only to
keep our sanity.”
(An interview with Caryl
Phillips,Clingman,2004:117)
Caryl
Phillips, well known as “Caz” among the literati, was born on the 13th of
March 1958 in St. Kitts in the West Indies. At the age of twelve, he left for
England with his parents and settled in Leeds. When his parents divorced, he went to live with his mother in
a strictly white working-class district. In order to bring up her four
children, Phillips’s mother had to do three jobs at a time. By race and class,
he was an outsider and he was aware it. He was a black boy in a white society. As he
pointed out: “we weren’t reminded that we were West Indian; we were reminded
that we were black”(Bell,1991:578). In this personal and cultural confusion,
the young Phillips started to look at the recent history of the Jews to find
answers to his questions. He visited
Auschwitz, Dachau and Anne Frank’s house. Moreover he discovered to
have, on his maternal side, a Jewish grandfather named Emmanuel de Fraites.
Regarding the Holocaust, he felt that “if white people can do that to themselves,
what the hell are they going to do to me?”(Bell,1991:601). At the age of 18, he
decided to study psychology and neurophysiology. Nevertheless, soon he realized
that he could not spend his life in studying science and he switched to
English. For this reason from 1976 to 1979, he went to the Queen’s College in
Oxford. During these years, he travelled for the first time to the United
States and decided to live in Edinburgh to devote his life in writing plays and
scripts. In 1980, the Crucible in Sheffield produced his first play Strange
Fruit. Subsequently, he was forced to move to London where he created other
two plays called Where there is darkness and Shelter. During his
journey to the USA, Phillips read a book called the Native Son and he
realized that he “would like to write a novel as good as this”(Bell,1991:583).
This experience and the lecture of authors such as Ibsen, Baldwin, Richard
Wright, Toni Morrison and Fulcker, brought Phillips to become a writer. After
his one-month journey around Europe, he wrote his most famous and
autobiographical essay called The European Tribe which is a collection
of travel writings. As he pointed out “it deals with Europe from a point
of view from which Europe has never had to deal with itself. It deals with
Europe from the point of view of somebody who has had the benefit of a European
education”(Bell,1991:589). Phillips’s experience as a black child in a white
society has left a mark on his work. His novels regard his preoccupation with
race, identity, home, Jewish and African Diaspora and migration. He has
affirmed:"I want to change Britain. I want us to become more aware of our
own history. If I can write about how Britain as a society is transforming
itself, then maybe one is filling in some of the gaps that have been left out
by the media, by history, by the politicians."(Moss,2009). Hence,
Phillips’s works have a common element: people who have been displaced and who
lack a comforting and stabilizing history or tradition. The focus is on the
thoughts and actions of individuals who experienced different historical
events. Thus, novels such as Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood
explore the feeling of alienation, loss of identity or loneliness experienced
by the survivors of traumatic events. Perhaps his most famous novel, that he
wrote after becoming the youngest English Professor in the USA, is Crossing
the River(1993). Thanks to this work, he won the Commonwealth Writers
Prize, the James Tait Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
When he moved to the USA, Phillips was an almost-Briton with Caribbean roots
living in America . However ,“contemplating the question of where he belongs,
he imagines some point in the mid-Atlantic, where lines subtended from the
triangle formed by West Africa, the Americas and the Europe would
meet.”(Clingman,2004:144). Nowadays he teaches contemporary British Fiction at University
of Yale and is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Michela Pezzini
Sources
- BECKER, B.B. (2010) ‘An Everblooming Flower: Caribbean Antidote to a European Disease in the Works of Caryl Phillips’ South Atlantic Review, Vol.75, No.2.: 113-134
- BELL, R.C (1991) 'Worlds Within: An Interview With Caryl Phillips'. Callaloo, Vol. 14, No.3 : 548-606
- CLINGMAN, S. (2004) 'Forms of History and Identity in the Nature of Blood'. Salmagundi, No. 143: 141-166
- CLINGMAN, S. (2004) 'Other Voices: An Interview with Caryl Phillips'. Salmagundi, No. 143 : 112-140
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